It’s a tale as old as time: Horny teenagers in a horror movie getting hacked to pieces by a masked madman with a big ass weapon. Unless it’s meta commentary or a winking subversion, most slashers more or less follow this formula. It’s part of what we love about them—there’s a campy comfort in knowing what’s coming.
But love them though we may, it’s worth noting how the genre reserves special disdain for women, especially the ones who defy norms. If they love sex or exist on the fringes of society or challenge the patriarchy in any way, they’re fit for damnation. Or, as is the case for the female characters on this list, they’re perfect models for feminist heroism. Because in horror, sometimes the bad girls burn brighter.
Here are five characters from horror camp classics worthy of distinction under this lens. The gleeful excessiveness of camp—the colors, the humor, the boldness—makes the gender stuff pop all the more. Because beneath the bombast and gore lies something radical and inventive, something only high-stakes and high-drama horror might evoke.
These women were punished for wanting too much, then rewarded through vengeance. Vengeance that feels, through the lens of cathartic horror season viewing, like justice for any othered person who relates. Even better, each of these gothic and dastardly dames would make for a great Halloween costume, so potent is their style and lasting impression.
Jennifer Check – Jennifer’s Body (2009)
Let’s start with a more modern camp classic: Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body. The film centers on Jennifer Check (Megan Fox), a small-town hot girl sacrificed by a hungry-for-fame rock band that incorrectly assumes she’s a virgin. Their ritual backfires and Jennifer comes back from the dead as a succubus who eats men. Her body, once an object of lust, becomes her weapon and her sexuality is now her liberation.
The film comes infused with a knowingness (helped along by Diablo Cody’s firecracker of a script) of the female experience and its woes. It also delves beyond male desire and gets into the thorny knot that is female friendship, too. Jennifer’s best friend Needy (Amanda Seyfried) is envious of her pal and especially so once she achieves demon status, which only deepens the tragedy to come. Jennifer’s rampage grows too unhinged and so Needy intervenes to kill her.
What was once a measure of control by men is now performed by another woman, as if Needy is servicing the patriarchy and restoring balance. It’s complicated in a way these films aren’t always, and it’s part of what makes Jennifer’s Body an enduring cult classic almost 20 years later. Though her story ends in death, Jennifer’s power remains.
Where to Watch: Stream on Hulu
Angela Franklin – Night of the Demons (1988)
Angela Franklin (Amelia Kinkade) begins Night of the Demons as a goth misfit. When she hosts a Halloween party in an abandoned mortuary and holds a seance, things go horribly wrong and Angela winds up possessed. Once an invisible loner, she’s now a feared predator, which is in many ways the ultimate embodiment of the “monstrous woman.” While possessed, she acts as temptress and even eats the tongues of men. She parties with the devil and, in the ultimate rejection of social norms, she likes it.
Night of the Demons spawned two sequels and Angela appears in both, dressed in her black lace dress, hair wild, face disfigured—unsightly and also pretty dang sexy. This is where the camp of it all really plays a role, because her eccentric look makes her iconography loom large. Her transition to evil becomes mythic over the course of the series, but one thing stays the same: this is a girl who loves to be bad and will make no apologies for it.
Where to Watch: Purchase on Blu-ray via Shout! Factory
Regine Dandridge – Fright Night Part 2 (1988)
In Fright Night Part 2, Regine Dandridge (Julie Carmen)—sister of the first film’s slain vampire–arrives with a vengeance. Her mysterious arrival tantalizes our protagonist Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale). She seduces him with her gothy vibes and hypnotic charms, and has him fooled until he notices her lack of reflection, revealing her vampire status.
Regine’s power is inversion. She’s both predator and performer, stalking Charley while embodying male erotic fears like the manipulativeness of seduction. She weaponizes their temptation, her vampirism a form of feminist theatre, her presence critiquing purity and her kills demonstrating a refusal to die quietly. (She also has a possé, as all the best villainesses do.)
In the end, Charley traps Regine in a coffin lined with communion wafers and exposes her to the sun, killing her. But Regine endures in cult memory as the rare horror villain whose allure outshines the protagonist’s moral order. She’s proof that the fallen woman can rewrite the script, even if she burns for it.
Where to Watch: Fright Night Part 2 is currently unavailable to rent or stream, but it’s getting a 4K UHD and Blu-ray release in 2026 so be on the lookout!
Christine Brown – Drag Me to Hell (2009)
Another 2009 cult classic is Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell, featuring Alison Lohman as a quiet bank loan officer named Christine. Desperate for a promotion and wanting to show she can make tough decisions, she denies an elderly woman an extension on her mortgage. Unluckily for Christine, the woman curses her and from there on out her life becomes a nightmare of escalating supernatural torment.
In this case, Christine’s “crime” isn’t lustful desire but that of ambition. She is quite literally cursed for attempting to climb a male-dominated corporate ladder and rejecting docileness. It feels like an embodiment of the guilt society assigns to women who seek power. The specters who barf bugs on her face and the shadow people who stalk her are constant, itching reminders of the cost of wanting too much, as if beckoning her to back down.
Raimi’s trademark combo of slapstick humor and gory scares plays up the extremity of Christine’s circumstance. In the end, the title becomes literal: Christine is unable to best the curse and is literally dragged into hell. But her punishment is not because she’s actually evil—it’s because the patriarchy-coded universe decided she should be.
Where to Watch: Stream on Tubi
Mary Lou Maloney – Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987)
In this sequel to 1980’s Prom Night, we meet popular girl Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) at her high school prom in 1957. She’s caught kissing a boy who isn’t her date and, motivated by revenge, he throws a stink bomb at her right after she’s announced as prom queen. His choice backfires… literally. Mary Lou catches fire onstage and burns to death.
Fast forward 30 years and Mary Lou is back with a vengeance. Desperate to reclaim her crown, Mary Lou’s spirit possesses a new female student, Vicki Carpenter (Wendy Lyon). Under Mary Lou’s influence, Vicki’s style and personality change dramatically. She turns the high school into a little shop of horrors, enacting Mary Lou’s revenge against the date she cheated on (now the principal) and the man she cheated with (now a priest). She goes on a full-blown vengeance tour, seducing and fellating and dancing her way through her horrors with glee.
Mary Lou’s reclamation of her power is as fun as it is messy. And the best part? She refuses to let men ruin her ambitions and keep her silent. So much so that we learn in the film’s final moments she’s hopped bodies and is now possessing her male killer. She may be dead, but her spirit lives on to show us that judgmental men deserve repercussions for the morality they force on their lovers but don’t practice themselves.
Where to Watch: Stream on Tubi
The post Bad Girls Burn Brighter: 5 Horror Villainesses Punished for Desire appeared first on Nerdist.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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